I have many sports-related products from 10-20 years ago. The vast majority of the items have all the original tags, but no UPC codes attached, presumably because it wasn’t mandatory at the time. Many FAQ’s suggest contacting the manufacturer, which would be great, except for the fact that most of these companies are no longer in business (many going belly-up when the NFL slashed its number of “authorized” manufacturers). So, that makes it difficult to go back and find information via that route.

I’ve also read FAQ’s suggesting one visit Ebay, Amazon, etc. to see if the product/UPC is listed there. So far, that has been little help, as the majority of items I have don’t seem to be listed elsewhere.

The other option I’ve seen is to actually buy NEW UPC numbers — and register them myself — but that seems rather disingenuous if they do in fact already have UPC’s. I mean, what if a dozen other sellers are registering the same item I am? I realize that isn’t likely, but simply slapping an arbitrary UPC code on the item sounds like it would only lead to more confusion.

What we need is some kind of master reference where we could find a manufacturer and sift through photos of the items until we found a match, but apparently that doesn’t exist.

Whatever is one to do? I keep hearing horror stories about items listed without the mighty UPC code, and I have plenty of items — otherwise new in all other aspects — missing the code, so I really want to have the correct identifier!

Seriously though, others here must have run into the same problem!

Thanks in advance for providing any insight.